This unexpurgated LP from ca 1962 probably got by the censors because Arthur Argo has a heavy Scots accent. Legman knew of Arthur Argo's Wee Thread O' Blue and mentions him in his 1990 Journal of American Folklore erotic songs bibliography.
- Lyrica Erotica
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Vol. 2: Arthur Argo - A Wee Thread O' Blue
[Prestige / International 13048]- The Dundee Weaver Time: 1:10
- An Aul' Man Cam Coortin' Me Time: 2:25
- Three Aul' Whores Time: 0:54
- Hishie Ba Time: 1:45
- Ye Ken Pretty Well What I Mean Time: 1:42
- Torn A', Rippit A' Time: 1:38
- I've A Laddie In America Time: 0:39
- Love Is Teasin' Time: 4:13
- The Hill O' Bennachie Time: 1:42
- Haben Aboo An A Banner Time: 1:24
- The Lobster Time: 1:33
- Hame Drunk Came I Time: 2:17
- Poor Wee Lady Chat Time: 1:16
- The Sodger An' The May Time: 3:02
- Wee Wee Time: 1:13
- The Ball O' Kirriemuir Time: 1:57
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The title of this album is both a promise and a warning. In choosing it to introduce this first outspoken record of Scots bawdy songs, Arthur Argo echoes the phrase with which the Scottish informant cautions a collector, lest that precious folk be with him wroth: "Mind, it has a wee threed o' blue in it!"
Why the threed is blue I cannot say. The term "true blue" is originally from Scotland, but it derived from the Presbyterian preachers' custom of throwing a blue apron over their tub, and not all Presbyterian preachers were like the clerical visitor to the Ball of Kirriemuir. The Covenanters wore blue as a symbol of rebellion against the Sassenachs, too, but in color symbolism blue stands for chastity, of which there is happily little in these songs. However, prostitutes were called "blue gowns" from the uniform worn by apprehended ladies of the evening in the English House of Correction, and Jung in his Psychology and Alchemy said that blue stood for the vertical, by which we may take it he meant the ithyphallic.
It is conceivable that some people will consider these songs a scabrous slander against the good Scots, who are concerned with more sublime interests. Let us hasten, therefore, to assure all and sundry that virile wit has long been an unashamed virtue of the northern Celts. From Robert Henryson, the great Scottish Chaucerian who on his deathbed composed five minutes before his exit from this planet an extremely indelicate stanza, to the national poet Robert Burns, Scottish literature has been well streaked with blue. The poetry published by Burns in his short but roaring lifetime is a bloodless distillation of the songs he sang to his rowdy companions of the Crochallan Fencibles.
Arthur Argo presents these songs with a diffidence not noticeable in his lusty singing; he asks that we remember the words of his great forebear, Gavin Greig, more than 50 years ago: "We must be careful ... not to confound a standard of taste with an attitude to morality. While this caution applies to our treatment of the old ballads and many of the older songs, it must be admitted that there is a considerable body of traditional minstrelsy still in circulation which is so frankly pagan in its dealings with sexual relations that it must be relegated to the Index Expurgatorius." The Scots have not so disposed of this minstrelsy; instead, they have given to it their loveliest tunes, with the result that Scots bawdry is the best bawdry in the language. These songs will prove the point—as well as going far toward answering that ancient and intriguing question about the Scotsman's kilt.
THE DUNDEE WEAVER: Arthur Argo learned this from the Scottish folksinger Robin Hall, but it has ancient roots. "The Elfin Knight," Child No. 2, deals with the preliminary gambits of the situation consummated in "The Dundee Weaver," and indeed its chorus
line, "the wind hath blown my plaid awa'," uses the same euphemistic metaphor for loss of virginity. The Child version came from a black letter broadside of about 1670 in the Pepysian library, but the thematic device of this ballad goes far back through the corridors of time in pre-Christian Europe. The advice-ending of this song is a commonplace in seduction-plaints; an American Negro analogue is "Keep your feet flat, girls, flat on the ground."
AN AUL' MAN CAM' COORTIN' ME: The emergent capitalism of the medieval period made marriage a game of Monopoly in which families on the make allied themselves for economic advantage through the forced marriage of sons and daughters of widely disparate ages. In such situations romantic love had to be sought outside the marriage bed, and Andreas Capellanus (who at the end of the 12th century codified the prevalent adultery into the ritual of Courtly Love) stated it very flatly: romantic love is possible on an extramarital basis. Courtly Love left us many legacies, especially our unnatural deference to women, which makes us men take our hats off to them, let them into lifeboats first, etc., but few of them singable. An exception is the December-May theme of many folksongs, of which this is one of the best.
THREE AUL' WHORES: This is probably the oldest indecent song in the English language, going back to "A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands," found in Ormsby-Gore's Porkington manuscript dated about 1460, with early analogues in Dutch (Wensliedje) and of course French {Evangiles des Quenouilles) ; but anthropologically examined, the boast of size of the pudendum muliebre is nearly universal. Those whose sensibilities are offended by the word "whore" should know that this and the word "dear" are etymologically identical, both deriving from the Latin carus.
HISHIE BA: Love is not all beer and skittles, as we say; there are tragic aftermaths, and the Scottish incidence of bawdy songs is paralleled by the Scottish illegitimacy rate, which is far higher than that of any other English-speaking country. "Hishie Ba" is despite its theme a lovely lament, with some of the shivering emotion of Robert Greene's "Sephestia's Song to Her Child" (1579):
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee;
When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.
YE KEN PRETTY WELL WHAT I MEAN: Arthur Argo had only the text of this from an elderly relative; the melody is his own composition. Like most of the songs on this record this engages in euphemism, a "form of speech which avoids calling things by their names" in order not to conceal the facts but to minimize the uncomfortable connotations of the naked words.
TORN A', RIPPIT A': Argo tells us that this is a conscious amalgamation of several "mouth-pieces" in his collection. Traditionally the "mouth-piece" is sung unaccompanied because it is performed only when the instruments for dancing are absent. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, which escaped the obscenity laws largely because its difficulties discourage the prurient, the linguistic obscurity of this ditty is worth the overcoming.
I'VE A LADDIE IN AMERICA: The Scots learn this stuff early. This is a Glasgow children's song, communicated to Argo by that city's favorite singer, Ray Fisher.
LOVE IS TEASIN': The transitoriness of love drove Keats to write one of the greatest of English poems, the "Ode on a Grecian Uran." "Love Is Teasin' " is among the most beautiful "pregnancy ballads," and made the sea-change to America as "Careless Love."
THE HILL O' BENNACHIE: This (and also "Hishie Ba," and "Love Is Teasin' ") was taught to Argo by Lucy Stewart, a Fetterangus hen-wife to whom he was introduced by Kenneth S. Goldstein in his researches in northeast Scotland a few years ago. The theme is not unusual in bawdy folksong: the action is begun by the stings of nature as well as the arrows of Cupid.
HABEN ABOO AN A BANNER: The substitution of nonsense syllables for forbidden words is a linguistic universal; a good case could be made out for the contention that most nonsense refrains derive from this cause.
THE LOBSTER: Almost as ancient and dishonorable as "Three Aul' Whores," this was among the leaves saved by Bishop Percy from the arsonous maids at Sir Humphrey Pitt's house, where they were "lying dirty on the floor," as Percy put it—how dirty he didn't know until he edited the material later. Percy's version, "The Sea Crabb," dates at least from 1620. One curiosity about this song is that all recent versions have cleaned out the earlier culmination of the action which would have put all three characters of the song in violation of Section 288 (a) of the California Penal Code.
HAME DRUNK CAME I: The tremendous popularity of "Our Goodman" coerced F. J. Child away from his Victorian delicacies to include this in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads as No. 274. How numerous are the variants is indicated by the fact that Indiana University folklorist Joseph Hickerson is now engaged in writing a definitive study of the ballad.
POOR WEE LADY CHAT': Field and Stream, concerned with outdoor sports, reviewed Lady Chatterley's Lover thus: "Although written many years ago, this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to the outdoor minded reader, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion, this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeper." Jim MacLean wrote this song as the reflection of an indoor sportsman upon D. H. Lawrence's book.
THE SODGER AN' THE MAY: Argo is unable to trace this version through the numerous variants that he and other petits viceurs know of this adventure of the soldier, whose ilk have always had extraordinary success with the ladies, though sometimes, as here, they have had to hurry up with it.
WEE WEE: The point of this utterly disgraceful ditty is that it satirizes the preciousness of accent of the affected people living in -the Morningside district of Edinburgh.
THE BALL OF KIRRIEMUIR: "Wha'll do it this time, wha'll do it noo? The ane that did it last time, canna do it noo"—and that's about all of this greatest of all dysphemistic songs in English that can be printed. It is internationally famous—or infamous; I collected in Australia some three dozen stanzas of "The Ball," all more wittily obscene than the rather mild excerpts Arthur Argo dared to sing. He correctly places this song at the end because "After all, what is there left to sing?"
ABOUT THE SINGER: Arthur Argo is the great-grandson of Gavin Greig, the folklorists' folklorist, the first to insist that words are inseparable from the tune, and, according to one authority, the last significant British folksong authority. The son of Agricultural people in Northeastern Scotland, Argo has been a newspaper reporter, and, simultaneously, a folklore collector for the archives of the School of Scottish Studies; in his fresh and iconoclastic approach there is a touch of his great ancestor. On this record his accompanist is ART ROSENBAUM, who has skillfully and tastefully adapted his banjo and guitar to the materials. Argo wishes it to be known that Rosenbaum was not merely an accompanist but a collaborator who is responsible for much that is good on this record, "despite the fact that he labours under the handicap of being American!"
Notes by John Greenway
Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder
Design by Don Schlitten
Produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein
(The Rembrandt engraving on the cover of this album
is used by permission of Charles Dexter Ward.)
13048
ARTHUR ARGO, vocals and guitar*
ART ROSENBAUM, guitar and banjo
Side A
1. THE DUNDEE WEAVER
2. AN AUL' MAN CAM COORTIN' ME
3. THREE AUL' WHORES*
4. HISHIE BA
5 YE KEN PRETTY WELL WHAT I MEAN
6. TORN A', RIPPIT A'
7. I'VE A LADDIE IN AMERICA
8. LOVE IS TEASIN'
Side B
1. THE HILL 0' BENNACHIE
2. HABEN ABOO AN A BANNER
3. THE LOBSTER
4. HAME DRUNK CAME I
5. POOR WEE LADY CHAT
6. THE SODGER AN' THE MAY
7. WEE WEE
8. THE BALL 0' KIRRIEMUIR